Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music

John Tavener (1944-
)

John
Tavener first came to public attention in 1968 with the premiere of his
oratorio The Whale at the inaugural concert of the London Sinfonietta.
The Beatles subsequently recorded this on their Apple label. Although
Tavener’s avant-garde style of the seventies contrasts with the
contemplative beauty of his works for which he is best known, the seeds
of the language he would later adopt were in evidence from an early
stage. Some of his first published compositions, notably Thérèse (1973)
commissioned by the Royal Opera House and A Gentle Spirit (1977) after
the short story by Dostoyevsky, showed that spirituality and mysticism
were to be his primary sources of inspiration. His conversion to the
Orthodox Church in 1977 resulted from his growing conviction that
Eastern traditions retained a primordial essence that the west had
lost. Works such as The Lamb (1982), and the large-scale choral work
Resurrection (1989) date from this period. It was in 1989 that Tavener
once again came firmly into the limelight, when the Proms premiere of
The Protecting Veil introduced his music to a new audience. The opera
Mary of Egypt, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1992. The same
year, a major documentary, ‘Glimpses of Paradise’ was broadcast on
BBC2. His 50th birthday year was marked in 1994 by the BBC’s Ikons
Festival, as well as another major Proms commission - The Apocalypse.
In 1997, the performance of Song for Athene at the close of Princess
Diana’s funeral showed that the profound effect of his music reached
far beyond just the concert-going public. The premiere of A New
Beginning played out the final minutes of 1999 in London’s Millennium
Dome; on 4 January 2000, Fall and Resurrection was premiered at St
Paul’s Cathedral, broadcast on both television and radio; he received a
Knighthood in the Millennium Honours List, and later the same year,
London’s South Bank Centre presented a major festival of his music. The
number of commissions from overseas increased, notably with
Lamentations and Praises (2000) for the San Francisco-based Chanticleer
(whose recording of the work secured for Tavener the Grammy award for
Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2003) and Ikon of Eros
(2001) for the Minnesota Orchestra. In the first years of the new
millennium, Tavener was led to look for inspiration from alternative
sources by his interest in the universalist philosophy of the late
Swiss metaphysician Fritjhof Schuon, which embraces all great religious
traditions. This change in direction is manifest in works written since
2001, such as the epic all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple (2002)
which includes Sufi poetry as well as Christian, Islamic and Hindu
texts; The Beautiful Names (2006) sets the 99 names for Allah from the
Qu’ran; the Requiem (2007) also sets words from the Qu’ran and the
Upanishads alongside those of the Roman Catholic requiem mass; and the
Hindu inspired Lalishri (2006) for solo violin and strings, written for
Nicola Benedetti.